The Great Humbling S6E4: The Consolations of Folklore

As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey.

Show Notes

* Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy.

* Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.

* Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales.

* Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth.

* On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970.

* The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd.

* For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster.

* Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’.

* The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World.

* James Bridle, New Dark Age.

* We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it.

* Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole.

* Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men.

* Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore.

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